Month: April 2015

Like so many inventions, it was an accident, like the serendipitous discovery of matches; so many government scientists working so many late nights in so many labs trying to uncover the newest biological weapon to win the war on terror, only to find that they were high as fucking kites if they inhaled the smallest amount of fumes of one particular compound. Of course it didn’t take long for one of those aspiring chemists to take that recipe home with him, realizing it had far greater potential recreationally than it ever would for the military. And after that it was only a matter of time before the details leaked onto the internet and became public knowledge.

Vex. The Perfect Drug. It sold itself. Try Vex, the dealers starting saying after time. A beautiful high like none you’d ever experienced, no side effects, no bad trips, no addictive potential – and it could be manufactured by all from simple household chemicals and cough syrup. It was a blessing. A gift from God. And it took America by storm. Suddenly the American government began funneling so many of those precious millions of dollars from the military budget over to the DEA, who now had their hands full with this new little nuisance called Vex.

No one’s ever shot it in liquid form, at least not as far as I know. But I’m on the edge. I’m willing to experiment. I’ve had enough with sniffing this shit out of flasks and vaping it. I need something better. Something more.

The needle goes in my arm, and oh God, it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever felt. A million orgasms’ peaks all thrown into one second of absolute celestial bliss. An existential high. I want to die now so I never have to come down.

And then my arm is itching. I look over, and scratch my fingernails against the skin. Oh god, it itches bad. I’m scratching and scratching and then I feel something hard. Then the skin breaks and I see what was beneath the surface breaking through – a human tooth. Now my arm is being torn apart, exploding into hundreds of them; smoker’s teeth, yellowed and covered in plaque, sprouting from my arm by the crease of my elbow and spreading all down my bicep and up toward my shoulder.

With horror I see that my fingers are twitching and writhing, swelling with bloat and growing into turgid tumescence. They are changing into tongues, tangled in long trails of saliva and covered in moist drops of spittle. They are writhing like they’ve been stung with cattle prods and flinging the thick drops of warm liquid everywhere.

I can’t feel my legs but look down to see that they are engulfed in flames. Horrible grey-green flames, burning brighter than the depths of hell and every funeral pyre erasing the horrors of the Holocaust from human memory.

My fingers – those tongues – itch and I feel them peeling apart like the withered skin of ancient dried oranges. They crack and open and myriad of tiny black specks, millions of baby spiders, emerge from the shattered tips and crawl all over my skin. They engulf the toothy forests of my arms and swarm onto over my torso. Up my neck and into my mouth they scurry as I let out a scream that no one will hear.

John was the first to go. We were in the interior, exploring, collecting wood for the fire, and trying to find something, anything, we could eat, when it happened.

One little misstep and he was enveloped by a grey cloud. He screamed and he screamed and he thrashed and thrashed but there was nothing we could do to help him. Soon he lay dead on the dirt of the jungle floor, covered in thousands of tiny welts. Killer bees, just another thing to watch out for on this god-forsaken little island.

After he died we heard strange sounds coming from the jungle. Moaning, and sorrowful howling, like that of a lonesome wolf.

The next day the blond woman – Jenn – tripped and a machete came flying end-over-end out of the trees and caught her dead center in the forehead. At least she didn’t suffer. But when we looked down and saw the tripwire she’d sprung lying limply across the path our collective horror only grew.

There was something else out there besides us. Other intelligent life. And it wanted us dead.

We were demoralized, in shock, but we had to keep surviving. Two days with only the little water salvaged from the boat and already some of us were weakening. We headed further into the interior and the bodies mounted.

Armand fell through what looked to be a pile of palm leaves on the ground, into a pit of sharpened bamboo spikes. I’ll never forget the horrible twisted look on his bloody face staring up into the jungle canopy, his one eye pierced through from behind with one of those wretched spikes.

Alastair stepped into a snare and was yanked into coils of rusted barbed wire hidden in the underbrush. We found the sapling with the other end of the rope attached afterward, sprung by what foul mechanism we could not ascertain.

There’s just three of us left now. As we sit around the fire in the darkness of the beach, tired, hungry, thirsty, demoralized, I hear the howling, the inhuman cries coming from the all around us.

I look into the jungle and see them coming out – the skin on John’s face is porous like a wasp’s nest made of dried mud, thousands of the tiny creatures crawling on him and buzzing all around. The machete still juts from Jenn’s forehead as she lumbers toward us. Armand is already rotting away, the bamboo stakes still protruding from his torso and through his pierced eye. Alistair is falling apart, his entrails spilling out of him as he slowly shuffles forward. And there are others, others I don’t recognize: a man with a caved-in head, a woman with a giant jagged scar all down her body, children missing their arms.

I knew there was something else out there. I don’t know what kind of island this is we’ve run aground on. But now I know that even the dead get lonely.

If I asked most people they’d think it’s degrading, depraved, twisted. They’d never understand how it’s only in feeling subjugated that I am empowered, it’s only in surrendering control that I truly gain it.

Pleasure and pain are not opposites, just different expressions of the same thing. The spectrum of human feeling isn’t a line; it’s a ring, like the one I wear on the chain around my neck – a circle, and those two sensations sit at the ends.

Kyle is riled up tonight, more than he has been for some time. It turns me on and I’m excited about what we’re going to act out.

You want me to tie you up, you deserve to be tied up because you’ve been a bad girl?

The night is dark and the headlights of the oncoming traffic are blurred and hazy, not entirely from the rain. My head my feels light and full of stuffy air and cobwebs. I shouldn’t be driving.

“Dad-day! My seatbelt!”

Mikey is crying and fussing in the passenger seat next to me. It wasn’t bothering him before, why now? Rain pours and the windshield wipers beat out their syncopated song. I stop at the light, its redness is blurry beneath the water still trickling down the windshield, refusing to succumb to the machinations of the wipers.

“Don’t fuss, Mikey, here, here,” I unbuckle him and try to buckle him in again.

“Dad-day! Dad-day!”

“Mikey, stop!” I struggle with the metal tip and his resistance at being resecured.

The car rolls out into the intersection but I feel – I know – it’s already too late to do anything. I realize I’ve seen this moment a thousand times before. Lived it, a million times before, and only once.

The world of the car interior is blasted with blinding white light, the headlamps of the oncoming transport truck. The horn sounds, loud and low and angry.

“DAD-DAY!” Mikey screams one last time, the terrified scream of an innocent child, and then there is only the sound of the collision and twisted metal.

I awake calling his name into the empty darkness of the bedroom, and the coating of sweat on my face is indistinguishable from my tears.

It’s hard to know what drives the desires of people, the things tucked away deep within the psyche, the secret lusts held in the heart, the twisted desires only revealed in the bedroom.

Those who don’t take part will never understand, can never understand; pleasure and pain are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin. They are not far removed from each other, but close – the spectrum of human sensation is not a line, but a ring, and they sit at its ends.

It’s strange things we do to the ones we love in the name of pleasure, but it’s how we care for them afterward that matters. No matter how many lashes rain down, no matter how hard I hit, no matter how bad the bruising, how many tears are shed and how much blood flows, I will always be there to care for her afterward. To show her that I love her, that I truly do.

Harder, she screams. More, she cries out. Do you want it? I say. Do you want it?!

Yes, please, she says, weeping. I want it. I want it more than anything. I love you. Please do it. Do it. I want it, please baby. I want it so bad.

I do it and she dies the little death, and then another.

I pull the zipper up the bag and heave her over my shoulder. There are shovels in the shed in the backyard. I will take care of her one last time, to show her that I loved her, that I truly did.

Back in my home country, I could have been a doctor. I came to America to pursue a better way of life, a dream. But I discovered that there are lots of other people in America trying to be doctors too, and my degree from back home wasn’t worth so much compared to theirs.

So now I drive a taxi, like so many other immigrants. I don’t resent it even, I’ve been doing it for almost 5 years now. It’s not so bad, really. If I’d come over here with a family to feed I’m sure it would be a struggle, but it’s just me. I don’t have the nicest apartment, but it’s much better than any place I’d ever have back home, and at least I don’t have to worry about being awoken by the terrifying sound of jets screaming overhead, or bombs being dropped on me.

I’ve found that when you’re a cabbie for a while you start to get the same sorts of questions over and over again from customers – well, the sober ones anyway. Busy night? How long have you been driving a cab for? What’s the largest fare you’ve ever had? What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen?

I get that last one a lot. As a taxi driver you get to see a cross-section of life afforded to few others in this world. You see it all, unfiltered, unedited, unflinching; life, with all its dark corners, and all the sordid vignettes that play out so many thousand times a night unnoticed. I’ve witnessed so many cross-sections of humanity and most of the time they act like I’m not even there.

But the craziest thing I’ve ever seen? The worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my line of work? Well, when the customers ask me about that, I always lie. I always tell them the story about that group of drunk college kids I made the mistake of picking up on St. Patrick’s Day in 2012. They’d stolen a keg from the bar and one of them, a frat boy type, was naked, and threw in up in the backseat.

Why would I lie? Because in order to be a good driver you have to make the customer feel at home. You have to have a good relationship with them, no matter how short their ride is, make them feel comfortable and safe. And if I told any of my customers the real story about the strangest thing I ever witnessed, they wouldn’t feel that way, because it terrified me more than anything else I’ve ever experienced in my life.

I’ve never told anyone else before, so you’ll be the only one. But first I need to tell you about dispatch, and a little bit about what it’s like to be a cabbie – because the strangest thing that I ever experienced as a driver wasn’t something I saw in my cab, but something I heard over the radio.

Dispatch calls out the names and addresses what gets called in, and we on the radio, if we don’t have a fare, answer back to accept, depending on who’s nearby. Of course, sometimes you have a fare picked up off the street, so the car accepting what’s called out by dispatch isn’t necessarily the closest one. And some of the other cabbies were lazy, and would lie about having fares, or say they weren’t nearby when really they were. Some of those assholes would even call out the wrong car number or steal other guys fares, knowing they’d never get caught.

You see, it’s a strange thing to work with people you never actually meet face to face. I mean sure, I come in to work every day and pick up my car, and make sure it’s clean and in good order before I head out, so I’ve met some of the other drivers. Tommy from Nigeria. Hank, the retired guy that used to own the pub down the street. But the majority of the other voices I hear on the radio are nameless, anonymous, coming out of the silence with only a number to identify them.

I’ve never met the dispatchers either, but I’ve gotten to recognize them by the sound of their voices and the way they operate. Michael has a low voice, gravelly and rough, so the other drivers are always asking him to repeat himself. He talks more than he should, too, and jokes around a lot.

I like Navid better. He’s got some kind of accent, I’m not sure what exactly, but his voice is higher and melodious, and he’s all business. When Navid is on dispatch, the company is a well-oiled machine, churning through fares like one of those money-counting machines the tellers use at the bank.

When Navid was on dispatch, the sound coming out over the radio was a mesmerizing symphony: him succinctly calling out the fares, the other drivers taking them, and the chirping and warbling of the radio in between as dispatch and drivers squeezed and released the buttons on their handsets.

“Jennifer, 11 37th Street outside The Green Orb Room.”

“Yup. Car 3134.”

“Thank you. Mrs. Hutchinson on 324 Sycamore. She’ll need help her with her wheelchair.”

And on and on it went. It made me happy, and was so much better than working with the other dispatchers, some of who would get caught up in mindless chatter, or even argue with the bad drivers. That always bothered me.

The terrifying thing I ever experienced happened that one night in 2013, the last night Navid ever worked. I was on the late shift, 6-6, and it was probably around 3 AM. I was coming back from a fare I’d taken out to the airport, so I had the long drive on the highway all the way back to downtown, with nothing but the warbling of the radio and Navid conducting the Symphony of the Dispatcher keeping me company. But the melodious tones of Navid’s cheery voice and the chirps and squawks of the radio quickly turned into a dark drama, one that I knew to be real.

“Two cars to Key Lofts at 517 Albion for Melvin and his friends.”

“3814. On my way.”

“Thank you. Someone else?”

“5 minutes, this is 4582.”

“Thank you.”

And then another voice came over the radio, one I’d heard about ten minutes ago, accepting a fare on the outside of town.

“Hello dispatch, this is 4317. I’m out at this house in the Gables, but it doesn’t look like there’s anyone here.”

We were finally able to track him down when he got sloppy. His last victim managed to cut him with a kitchen knife before she met her grisly end. The weapon didn’t fit his usual MO. We ran the DNA of the blood on the knife and bing-bang-boom – there he was – two counts of sexual assault in 1997. Then it was simply a matter of knocking on that Russian bastard’s door and paying him a visit.

Graves and I headed right to his place in the East End as soon as we found out.

Knock, knock, Anton.

“Anton Krisanov? This is the police! Open up!”

Bang bang, two shots through the door. One right into Graves’ neck. One a leaving a burning trail of exploding pain left of center in my chest, and me flat on my back.

I fought to remain conscious. The ceiling tiles blurred and melded into each other above me.

Then I heard the door creak open, and his footsteps, and a terrifying sound, the sound of an engine, of a machine with a spinning blade.

The sound grew louder and I heard Anton’s voice singing in a Russian accent:Fee-fi-fo-fumI smell the blood of an EnglishmanBe he alive, or be he dead,I’ll grind his bones to make my bread